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Friday, February 13, 2015

Entrepreneur Expo 2015: The Experience

Entrepreneur Expo took place on January 29th,
2015 in the IC atrium. Hundreds of students attended and spoke with
representatives from small businesses about their experience with starting a
company. Students also had the opportunity to ask about funding options and
programs provided by the government or other organizations to help start their
own ventures.Alumni of UTSC were
present to talk to students about their career path as well.

The keynote
speaker, Andrew Peek, faces the audience, nervous, but combined with his
excitement makes it seem more like an intense anticipation. To say he delivered
a speech on entrepreneurship would be an understatement. Rather, he questioned
the nature of society’s conventions, asking us to choose between following
comfortable, well-known rules, or to write the rules ourselves. He emphasized
that above all else, curiosity is what will motivate us to seek answers that
are far more complex than what we are accustomed to. Finally, he set out to replace
the ideas of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ with ‘progress’ and ‘revision’,
respectively.His perspective regarding
entrepreneurship and, by extension, education and everyday life, was thoughtful
and inspiring.

I’m not sure
what I expected to get out of Entrepreneur Expo, but I’ll tell you what I
learned. Entrepreneurship is more than starting your own business; it’s taking
a chance on a theoretically plausible idea, revising that idea in the context
of real life, and having a possibly illogical amount of faith that the idea
will exceed your expectations. I was surprised that during the entrepreneur
panel, none of the questions were about the business plan or the logistics of
starting your own company. What students were concerned with is how it felt to
abandon a traditional career pathway in favour of something less predictable.
Typically, we prioritize being safe above being happy.

Andrei
Arkhanguelski, an entrepreneur on the panel, said something truly memorable in
response to this. At some point in our lives, we find that being safe is not
enough. He had a stable job that he left to start his company. Though not all of us will be entrepreneurs,
there is a lesson in this: we can only stay on a path that we define as safe
for so long, before we decide it is not what we want.The only barriers that stand in front of our
goals are the ones we put there ourselves.